Rhythm
by Dorku No Renkinjutsushi
Summary: House and Chase and all the rhythms of life. HouseChase slash


**Title:** Rhythm  
**Author: **Dorku no Renkinjutsushi  
**Characters/Pairings**: House/Chase  
**Rating**: R  
**Warnings**: slash, angst. The usual.  
**Disclaimer**: Don't own. Hate the new team. Want the ducklings back.  
**Summary**: House and Chase and all the rhythms of life.

* * *

You never think you'll be forced to thrust your hands into the chest of someone you honest-to-god care about. Never. In med school, during your residency, you know (somewhere, vaguely) that you will end up thrusting your hands into someone's chest at some point in time, somewhere, somehow. It's one of those miracles of medicine, doctors massaging human hearts back into rhythm, back into life. You know you'll do it at some point.

But you never think you'll do it to someone who's found a way into your heart.

Maybe it starts with the fact that you'd like to think that you don't have a heart, that nobody matters to you. Because, really, all things said and done, caring just doesn't work. You're not the sadist you like people to think, no, but you're not a masochist, either.

What you are is smart. Too smart to continue letting something stupid like another person keep hurting you, anyway.

But maybe that's why you were drawn to him in the first place. An Australian, so far from home, looking for work in big, bad America. He had a resume that could have gotten him a job at any hospital in any country for any price he felt like naming. All he asked of Cuddy was the shot at the open fellowship slot with Doctor Gregory House and permission to swing from ICU, PICU, and NICU.

Within the week, his resume was on your desk, and Cuddy was standing over you, hands on hips and shirt gaping open. She all but ordered you to at least be kind to the boy.

So you were fully prepared to be as vicious as possible on Wednesday morning.

That was, of course, until Tuesday night at ten o'clock. You were staring at a list of symptoms, trying to thread them into one disease when the phone rang.

"Hello?" you asked.

A strong, proud voice—Australian, with a hint of Czech underneath—introduced itself as Doctor Rowan Chase. He claimed to be the father of Doctor Robert Chase. He said that his son wasn't worthy of the fellowship. Robert, he claimed, was lazy, sloppy, and more than content to get by on his good looks. He had no ambition, he said, and no dedication. Left seminary school after so little time, he said. Not worthy of the position, not worthy of the job, and just doing it out of spite for his father, he said.

Wednesday morning rolled around. Doctor Robert Chase was of a medium height, blond, and skinny. His clothing choices asserted that he was, as his file proclaimed, colourblind, but too proud to ask for help. (Or, perhaps, he just didn't have someone to help him.) His accent was thick, and it amused you how comforting that quasi-British tone could be. His work was impeccable, so far as you could tell. He was quiet, and never looked you in the eye. He shied away from Wilson as he strode into the office. He was subservient, obedient, and hiding his strength.

You put together your own conclusions about his life. Fleeing Australia to flee his father, taking a low-key job to escape his reputation. Determined to fade into the background, to not attract attention, to appease his superiors. Scared. Nervous. Intelligent. Strong. Meek, mild, and dangerous.

Very definitely abused.

You recognize yourself in him, a little. You recognize what you could have become. You could be him right now, and you know it. Those baths in ice water could have stilled your tongue, stunted your spirit, lowered your eyes.

But they didn't.

You wonder why.

Your newest fellow is a puzzle, and a much more puzzling puzzle than your patients. Your other two fellows are boring by comparison, despite the fact that they, too, once provided your every amusement. Doctor Francis Olli—surgeon by trade, diagnostician by practice—watches you quietly, recognizing the signs, adding them all up in the back of her mind. She knows you, and she knows diagnostics.

"He's abused," she tells you one evening, as you're watching him leave. "Be careful. He doesn't need you abusing him, too."

You wave her away, her two weeks notice in hand. Maybe she's right. Then again, maybe she's not.

Within three weeks, you have the office all to yourself. Well, yourself and Robert Chase. He works quietly, doing all of your charting, all of your clinic work, everything. If you ask it of him, he does it.

You decide to experiment. You begin to act angry, to yell at him, to threaten him, to debase him and degrade him.

He responds exactly how you expect. Where most people's hackles would rise, his shoulders sink, his eyes fall, and he starts adding "sir" to the end of everything he says to you.

It's like kicking a puppy.

So, yeah, your diagnosis is proven. It's Abused Child Syndrome through and through. The way he obeys and rolls over says it all, screams that there was no love but tough love, that he's not enough, that he's never been enough, that he'll never be enough. The way he shies away from physical contact screams that somebody hit him, somebody pushed him, somebody overpowered him.

It's not until he's been your fellow for two months that you figure out what to do.

He loses a patient in PICU one afternoon after you've been teasing and tormenting and poking and prodding and all but stabbing him in the heart. Her heart stops. He tries CPR. He tries defibrillation. He actually cuts her open, cracks her ribs apart, and tries to massage her heart back to life.

None of it works. She dies, a tiny little thing, only eight years old, with long dirty blonde hair, a lisp, two missing teeth, and dark brown eyes. Her blood is still on his hands.

You find him in the locker rooms, staring with empty, haunted eyes at those same hands. He had the presence of mind to strip off his gloves, but his arms are still stained red. Coming closer, you can see that you first took to be blood is actually scalding. A third look tells you that maybe there is a little blood, but it's all his.

You sit down and stare at him.

He continues to stare at his hands.

You stare.

He stares.

You open your mouth.

He stares.

"You did enough," you say, the words echoing in the silence.

He cries.

From there, your relationship changes. You treat him just as you always have when everyone else is there and he's in front of people. But when the sun goes down and the moon comes up and the blinds are drawn and the stars are the only pinpricks of light in your office, you tell him what he needs to hear.

You are enough. You do enough. You are strong. You did the right thing.

Sometimes he cries. Sometimes he sits in stony silence, staring at the wall. Sometimes he paces, strides long and angry, the anger he's never shown bleeding through in every movement.

I know about your mother, you say. I know about your father. I can tell. I can read you. You are an open book to me.

You realize one day that you are getting close to another human again. You recognize when he's about to have a migraine. You start to notice the little things he does to cope with his colourblindness. You notice he reads lips shamelessly when people think he isn't listening.

You add Battered Wife Syndrome to the list of things your fellow is suffering from. There's only one place scars that new on his back could have come from.

So you do what you can. You hire another fellow.

You can tell that he's not happy to have to share his sandbox with Doctor Allison Cameron. You're not too happy to let her join the fun. She's too bright and bouncy and upbeat. She's too touchy-feely. She is incapable of reading either one of you, and doesn't seem to realize that there are just some things you don't say in front of Robert Rowanevich Chase.

As if to add a buffer between the three of you, you hire Doctor Eric Foreman. He's got a criminal record and a chip on his shoulder the size of Australia. He's kind of like you in the making, minus the pain and suffering that make you who you are. He's abrasive and crude and unfriendly and a little bully, when you get down to it.

But having him around prompts Chase right out of his shell. The angry spark that means someone is alive is back in his blue eyes, and the fight you've rarely seen is a part of him once more. He gets an attitude. He gets fire.

You kind of like it.

You are still kind of surprised the day you tease Chase about his sexual proclivities—gay, likes to dominate and be dominated, what a catch—and he looks coolly at you and says quite calmly, "are you, perhaps, interested, Doctor House?" while cocking an eyebrow and adding a hint of slink to his movement.

Battered Wife Syndrome tumbles off the list. That's where the scars came from, clearly. You do actually have an inkling of what happens in proper BDSM clubs and their relationships. Any man with that kind of personality change has to have been trained. Training can leave scars. So can masters.

Watching a Doctor Robert Chase who has some attitude is absolutely amusing. He squabbles with the other ducklings (for so you have unceremoniously dubbed them, courtesy of the nurses gossiping about the way they tail you), does the doctor's equivalent of pulling Cameron's pigtails and kick Foreman in the nuts every once in a while, and charms the entire hospital into eating out of his hand.

Only you get to see Robert Rowanevich Chase, who is still the unworthy son, still the whipping boy, still the failure. You alone have seen him cry, and you alone recognize why the smell of gin makes him throw up, and why the smell of antiseptic makes him gag until he adjusts to it again. These are your secrets, and his secrets, and together you must keep them.

And then one day you discover that he kisses the way he walks, sweetly and gently, with just a hint of fire beneath the surface. What a discovery that is. Bold and enlightening, really, what with the way he corners you during one of your evening get togethers and weaves one hand behind your skull, pulls you inexorably forward, and lets his lips grace yours.

From then on, you're eating his every comforting, quasi-British word and you know it.

You're not so sure he knows it, though, what with the way he still acts. He still acts scared and beaten. He still acts like the boy who first walked into your office. It takes you all of a week to put together what he wants—no, what he needs.

After that, you dominate him. You pin his wrists against the wall, tie them to the headboard, bind them behind his back. You bite at his throat, at his chest, at his oh-so-lovely hips, leaving dark marks and darker feelings. You turn him into your personal slave, and he revels in it.

You begin to realize that it makes him feel safe and loved and taken care of, to have you humiliate him, to tear him down to his basest parts, to leave him dangling on the edge for hours.

Because you always pick him up again, a little voice whispers. You don't leave him there forever. You put him back together and put him in your bed and hold him and stroke him and pet him and whisper sweet, meaningless nothings in his ear all night long, or at least as long as he needs it.

So you push him away. You push him out of your bed, out of your office, out of your life. You push him straight back into the ICU and PICU and NICU and the OR. You've completed your task. You've made him human, made him strong. You've pushed that iron core through the fire and found it deserving and worthy of praise.

There are different ways of making a man than the ones your father used.

Having pushed him away, you try to act like you don't care what's happening with your now ex-fellow, the longest lasting fellow you've ever had. Three years and nine months, that's how long he stayed with you. Long enough to know everything about you and to still care, to still love you.

Maybe pushing him away wasn't your greatest plan ever, you decide, watching the heart monitor carefully as another doctor stitches his chest shut. You know how sensitive he is, how fragile he really is inside. And still you pushed him away and broke him.

And this time, you didn't come and put him back together again.

So he has a nervous breakdown. Goes into the showers, turns the water on so cold that he's hypothermic in under fifteen minutes. Isn't found for ten minutes after that. Has died ten times since then.

This most recent time, nothing was bringing him back. So you do the unthinkable. You make physical what you have been doing mentally for three years, nine months, and three and three-quarters weeks.

You cut him open, crack open his protective cage, and set him back in rhythm with your bare hands.


End file.
